Trego's Mountain Ear

Sitting with a recovering knee, I found the time to hunt down the court case that legalized discriminating against higher IQ scores. I knew it was out there, but finding the story took some effort. We have to go back nearly thirty years – to a time when a man named Robert Jordan applied for a job with New London’s police. Jordan scored 33 on the placement exam – the equivalent of an IQ score of 125. He didn’t get the job. New London’s police interviewed candidates who scored from 20 to 27, believing that folks who scored higher would get bored and quit, wasting the community’s training. (ABC News, Court Okays Barring High IQ for Cops Sept. 8, 2000).

Now it wasn’t a Supreme Court decision – just the second court of appeals. The court did also notice that “the policy may be unwise, but is a rational way to reduce job turnover.” The article goes on to describe the police average IQ as about 104 – basically just a little above the average. Jordan’s score of 125 places him in the top 5% of Americans.

Now I’ll have to check on the average convict IQ – I don’t see any court cases where discriminating against criminals by IQ is a thing.